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Sunday, April 2, 2017

What Is Truly Disabling Here...

...Is that we are made to forget that the value of out of work people is still there. And we squander more and more of that value simply because we've become so screwed up on what is "valuable" in the first place.

And let's be especially clear here. Everyone in this nation is desperate.

We are desperate for meaning. We are desperate for real connection. We are desperate for not being lied to. We are desperate for a sense that each of us matters. That we can live each day knowing that we belong because we know, intrinsically, that we are needed.

The current economic operating system, in the case of people being permanently displaced from work, makes it appear as a case of "they failed the market test," so it is, by default, a deficiency of the worker to adapt. Thus making the fact that what we are expected to adapt to has become an inhuman, electro-mutated disaster, supposedly non existent.

If we were organized into city states, of whatever size, where we, as citizens, were responsible for keeping everything going, sharing the load of all of the things that needed doing to keep our cities going, we'd all have jobs automatically. We'd have training automatically because that would just be a necessity, as well as just another of the tasks we could also share in doing (because each of us has something they can teach to others). You would matter automatically because we would really need you to show up every day, same as everybody else. That way we could have enough workers to ensure for 3 or 4 day work weeks (assuming 10 hour days). Which then means you'd have the time to take and tinker with making your own end use items (all the personal things you live, and play with).

The specifics of how we do this would be a big part of the discussion we would have to have as a nation. A discussion that would have to take place from the community up, because this has to be done with a lot of leeway for folks of a like mind to live the way they want to live, without forgetting that cooperation between city states can only be maintained if certain, republic wide, norms also be respected. All of which is no more than to say that the tension between individual rights, and the rights of the society as a whole, must be negotiated with the spirit of compromise because each side absolutely needs the other.

As you can imagine, this won't be at all easy. Saying that, however, does not, in any way, preclude the fact that there is simply noting for it but to accept the task and move on. We can still be a Nation. We really need to still be a Nation. It will have to be a Nation, however, that will be its own microcosm of the world; a place where many of the things done in one City State, are repugnant, or even blasphemous in some sense, in another. We must do this because going to ideological war, or economic war, or even holy war, is no longer practical, even within the coldest of cold logic. Too many physical interconnections about the planet now, and too many costs never fully paid for, have collided into too many trigger points for disastrous cascade events, where a node in a system goes down, causing an ever widening, multi dimensional, branching of failures in dependency linked nodes all over the place.

You really do need to stop being so focused on other things and become primarily focused on this. Even your current job, if you have one, isn't as important as this is. The brutal fact of the matter is that we're all going to have to stop working. We're all going to have to stop thinking in terms of what work used to be, or what government used to be. It is time now for all of us to be involved in how we redefine both. And we need to get started right away because they very fact of the difficulty ensures that it will take time to accomplish. And things are not getting better while we dither.

Think about it. Get your friends and neighbors thinking about it, and having their friends and neighbors do the same. Become more informed. Ask deeper questions. Gett off of your butts and take peaceful action.

Rural Americans turn to disability as jobs dry up

About Me

I am retired now, but I used to make my living as a Systems Analyst\Developer.

As my real passion has always been ideas, writing, reading, social change and music I am devoting myself to all of these. The primary focus, however is on social change.

It is my firm belief that Capitalism is obsolete. It has been rendered so because of electrified information systems. Not only do these make human skill as a commodity absurd, they also turn information into money, and money into information. At the very least, this reality makes representational Democracy virtually impossible because it can longer move freely. As a commodity it is necessarily subject to the net gain requirement in any exchange. As such information flow is seldom conducted for the benefit of the receiver.